What is the First Lie?

At some point in our lives, it has occurred to all of us to ask at least one of three fundamental questions:

1. "Who am I?"2. "What am I supposed to be doing here?"3. Are these people all crazy or is it just me?

Most of the stress and uncertainty that inspires us to ask those questions can be traced to a single source: The first lie that confronts us. It's the lie that spawns and supports all lies, including those we have come to believe about ourselves and others today. That lie was a direct assault on our personal identity and purpose. It hit us soft and it hit us hard, when we were most vulnerable, when we were new to the world. Like a mental virus, passed from parent to child, from society to infant, from serpent to Eve, it is the lie that you are not enough. It plays on fear and insists that the spirit, the gifts and amazing personal potential you bring into this world are not enough.

"This is the real world" suggests the lie, "Here it is best to do what we do, think what we think, see as we see. It's for your own good." Except that it isn't for your benefit all. It demands that you put aside your true nature and your connection to the source of all that is true, and accept a counterfeit reality. It is the first lie. Accepting it is the reason, years later, that a teen has his first thoughts of suicide, a thirty year old woman with chronic addiction and relationship issues passes out in a strange bed and a middle-aged man rises from another restless night and stares in the mirror while wondering where his life has gone. They have lost their identity to a lie. Have you?

False Identity

The belief that we are incomplete upon arrival leaves us vulnerable to arbitrary and brittle mental constructs. We are asked to accept that we are a product of our parents. We are judged on our features and deemed smart or slow, rich or poor, fat or thin. The color of our skin seems to have social ramifications. We are declared to be American, Scot, an Arab or Inuit, not because of who we are, or the unique potential we represent, but depending on where we happen to arrive on the planet. What our father does for a living seems to matter, as does our mother's accent or native tongue.

Soon, before we can speak for ourselves on the matter, we will be sprinkled, baptized or held upside down over a goat or cow and identified as practitioners of a theology that narrows our perspective instead of expanding it. Of course, it isn't enough that we are pressed to accept these limiting ideas about ourselves, we are also required to see and judge others on the same basis. As the highest expression of energy in the universe, we are offered an amazing opportunity, to be a physical part—a witness to—the evolution and expansion of the universe. But those who have lost themselves to fear and confusion are demanding that we join their club.

We are meant to be explorers in an amazingly rich and diverse universe. Yet, we are quickly pressed to think of ourselves as one thing or the other and to consider others as being one thing or the other. We are asked to put aside out true nature and accept layer upon layer of false identity. All of this comes as a consequence of a lie...the first lie.